Vine Vs Instagram: Battle of Short Video Apps

If you’re mad about extensive set of effects being offered by Instagram for your conventional photographs, you probably haven’t heard about Instagram videos yet. The new service unveiled by Instagram allows you to record and post 15 second videos. The much awaited service made its debut right when its competitor “Vine” was released. The all new feature offers much similar service as that of vine.

If you think that there isn’t much scope in this area and there would be hardly anyone out there who would use this service then you’re probably wrong. Vine has managed to grab 13 million users which is around one tenth of the instagram user base. Interestingly, there isn’t any video sharing app which has managed to grab such a massive attention.

The instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom did mention that they had initially thought about adding such service but in order to keep it speedy and beautiful, they left out this option. However, this time around it seems that the feature has hit the chord. According to the unconfirmed reports, there were about 5 million videos that were uploaded in the first 24 hours.

So, how exactly the Instagram video service is different from vine? Who is winning this war between two newly released and popular short video sharing apps? Although we all know that the instagram’s video feature is definitely inspired from the vine; there is a long tail of differences between these two. Let’s get to them one by one.

Vine Vs Instagram: Battle of Short Video Apps

Shooting A Video

When it comes to shooting a video within the apps, vine’s user interface is so simple that a noob smartphone user would easily get used to it within few minutes. The on-screen elements such as video viewer and timeline lets you switch between each other very easily. You can tap anywhere on the screen to start recording a video. The bad thing about this approach is that you need to re-start shooting if you’ve committed any mistakes. Finally, you can preview your 6 second video before sharing it on your timeline. In the case of instagram videos, it allows you to shoot for 15 seconds whereas vine lets you shoot for 6 second. Interestingly, instagram lets you adjust focus and exposure while recording. The intelligent tap-n-hold recording feature has been taken from the vine.

As mentioned earlier, vine lets you tap anywhere on the screen to start recording but when it comes to instagram; you got to tap on the camera button which is present on the screen. That’s probably because instagram lets you adjust exposure and focus with a tap on the screen. This feature is particularly useful in low light conditions. On the lighter note, instagram also lets you switch between front and rear camera with single tap.

Additionally, instagram allows you to delete the previous clips from the timeline if you’ve committed any mistake. For me, a clear winner in this section is instagram with following set of features which offers little bit more than what is being offered by vine.

15 seconds of shooting time

Ability to adjust exposure and focus

Processing and Sharing

As you’ve completed shooting your video on vine, you can simply share it on vine, twitter and Facebook. Additionally, you can uncheck all this three platforms and save the video on your phone. Although you can’t import the video back in vine to share, the feature seems useful to some extent.

The sharing capability offered by these two is identical but what makes instagram different is the ability to add filters and image stabilizers before sharing. There are almost 13 different filters that are available at your disposable which can alter the colors and make the video more beautiful. The video stabilizer named Cinema lets you stabilize the images in videos before sharing. Once you’re done, you can share the videos to Facebook, twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare or email it to your loved ones. Like vine, instagram also allows you to save the copy of the video in your camera rolls.

Instagram is once again a clear winner with the extra set of features.

Timeline

When it comes to comparing the timeline of these two apps, the basic functionality remains the same. Both of these apps offer buttons to like and add comments. The only difference is that video on the vine timeline loops continuously whereas instagram stops playing a video once it has completed one loop. Also, the timeline on instagram is stuffed with the mixture of static photos and videos. A filter or tab to just show the photos or videos would definitely add a good value.

Vine wins the race as the feature of continuous loop is beneficial for the users (which are not offered by instagram).

Discovering Videos

Vine is equipped with explore screens such as editor’s picks, popular videos and trending hashtags which helps you find thousands of new videos instantly. Instagram has a lot of room to improve itself in this area. There isn’t any filter available to differentiate photos and videos either. Although you can use hashtag “#video” to filter the videos out; there is no guarantee that it will filter all the videos.

Winner- Vine

Conclusions

I’ve debriefed 4 important features of these two apps and now it’s upon you to see which features matters you the most. For me, instagram works pretty well as it has most of the features that I need.